Jay Wilson Interview by Play.tm

Posted By: November 27, 2008

While Games Radar might have been quite late with their preview, they are now officially beaten by Play.tm in terms of publishing content late. The gaming site managed to hold on to their Jay Wilson interview for almost 5 months, namely Games Convention Leipzig in August! Well, having said that, it’s a quite interesting interview, and it’s well worth a read. For one thing, Jay is answering a tiny bit more about the team exchange that took place when Blizzard North (mostly) left the company:

How long has the game been in the works?

Almost six years. Although I’ve been working on it for almost three. In my team there are a few guys who have been involved the whole time, but the majority of the team has been involved for two to three years.

Is this in part because of the creative issues that had to be resolved earlier in the project?

Yeah. I think the first issue… I can’t speak much about Blizzard North because its before my time, but one of the biggest issues was that because of the values of Blizzard in general its really hard to have an external creative group, separate from the core group. There’s too much that’s done; sound, cinematics and story – so much of its done at core Blizzard HQ that they learnt the lesson that all groups should be internal. That’s the only way that all the philosophy gets passed on. That’s the conclusion they came to when they tried to bring Blizzard North into the main HQ arena. I think they offered 46 of the 49 positions… to move down. It wasn’t that they didn’t want Blizzard North involved, it was that they said “you guys don’t function well away from us”. So a lot of the team came down.

Since then, we’ve had creative struggles… trying to find a game worthy of the Diablo 3 name.

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